This week, I read an article by marriage psychologist John Gottman called “What Makes a Marriage Work.” I looked up Gottman’s research because I remembered reading about it a few months ago when I read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (which I strongly recommend, by the way. It’s absolutely fascinating, and it has a bunch of random topics and research so I’m sure someone else could use it for their project as well). This is the Amazon link to the book: <p><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316010669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328585996&sr=8-1″ title=”Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”>Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking</a></p>.
Gottman is a marriage psychologist who has conducted research on over 200 couples in the past 20 years, but the interesting thing about him is the way he conducts his research: he has a marriage lab, and he tapes a short conversation between a husband and his wife (about thirty minutes long) recording their physiological responses (heart rate, perspiration, etc), facial expressions, and tones of voice. He analyzes each video carefully, makes a prediction about the marriage, and sees whether it comes true in 5 or 10 years. The amazing thing is that 99 percent of the time, it does. By watching one short, 30 minute conversation between a married couple, he can predict whether the marriage will last.
Through this lab, Gottman discovered several indicators of marriage success, but since the whole explanation of what he discovered is long (I will definitely use as much of it as I can on my senior exit project because it’s fascinating, but the articles I read on him along with the Blink chapter about him are nearly 50 pages long so I can’t discuss everything) I will only focus on the article I mentioned above, from the magazine Psychology Today.
In this article, Gottman mentions that the conventional view that marriages in which a lot of fighting take place or marriages in which conflicts are ignored are at high risk for failure are wrong. This goes directly against some of what I discussed in my last blog post, but I would like to explore both of the differing views in my project. According to Gottman, any of the three major types of marriages (Validating, in which couples compromise and calmly work out issues; Volatile, in which passionate arguments are the norm; and Conflict-avoiding, in which the couples rarely discuss their problems) can work equally well.
He went on to mention several couples, each with one of these types of marriages, and he discussed how they got along and their strongly contrasting methods of dealing with conflict. The interesting thing was that each of those couples stayed together many years after he had first interviewed them. Instead, Gottman found that the predictors of marital failure come in the same forms, no matter what type of marriage a couple has. First and foremost is the negative to positive ratio. To have a healthy marriage, the amount of negative interactions and comments must be balanced out with positive affirmation, affection, and kindness. This balance was far greater than what I expected: it must be in a five to one ratio; in other words, couples need to have five times as many positive as negative interactions AT LEAST, because anything less is a strong indicator of impending marital failure.
Gottman also identified what he calls “The Four Horsemen,” or the four signs that communication is getting progressively worse in a marriage. The first horseman is criticism. This shows up when a couple moves from complaints (which actually help the marriage, since they allow husband and wife to discuss any issues they might be having and work them out to their mutual satisfaction rather than holding them in, so nothing ever gets better) to making things personal. The example Gottman uses is that instead of saying “We never go out” a wife might begin to say “You never take me anywhere.” The accusatory use of the word “you” is critical: it indicates that the problem is the husband’s fault, instead of merely being an issue the wife is having.
The next horseman is contempt, which comes riding on the heels of criticism. As a husband and wife begin to criticize each other more and more, what began as a complaint becomes disgust in the behavior of the other person. Each time an argument and a criticism is repeated, this behavior is brought up again and again until it becomes cemented in the husband/wife’s mind that this is a negative personality trait of his/her spouse, and contempt shows up in the form of rolled eyes, curled lips, and failure to listen.
The third horseman is defensiveness. This obviously shows up as a result of criticism and contempt, as both the husband and wife begin to take a defensive attitude to protect themselves from their spouse’s accusations. The problem with defensiveness is that when people are busy protecting themselves from insult or refusing to take blame, they can fail to listen to others. Gottman cites several signs of an overly defensive mode of communication: denying responsibility, making excuses, and cross complaining (or meeting a complaint with a complaint, ignoring what the other person said) . None of these lend themselves particularly well to paying attention and trying to cooperate or compromise, and that is what makes defensiveness so destructive to a relationship.
Finally, the last horseman is stonewalling. This is when one person gets so fed up with the arguments of the other that he/she just shuts down, refusing to respond or show any sign of listening. While this is an extremely negative behavior and can hurt marriage when executed by both men and women, it seems that it is actually worse when the man stonewalls, because a woman has a far more negative, aggressive, and hurt response to being ignored. According to Gottman, stonewalling “conveys disapproval, icy distance, and smugness” and this can lead to a total failure in any attempts at communication, essentially ruining chances of fixing the marriage.
The most fascinating thing about this for me is that Gottman could see early predictors of these four horsemen in a mere thirty minute conversation between newlyweds. His research is definitely going to have to be included in my senior exit project, and I’m thinking of using a movie or a clip of a theater production of one of Miller’s plays (maybe After the Fall, or maybe a more well known piece of his) and seeing if I can detect any of what Gottman sees in these couples in the actors of the plays. While I know it’s just acting and fiction, I would like to see if the conversations Miller invented based on his life experiences and the emotions he urged his actors to convey are accurate representations of a failing marriage, and if they show any of the traditional conversational patterns Gottman observed.
upintheairika 
Let me recommend: Miller’s autobiography Timebends. It may prove useful (and hopefully not debunk any of your findings).
Although, I’d also recommend you save it for when you feel like you’re about done.